16-Year-Old Is Fatally Shot on His Way Home From a Party in Brownsville

Iquan Williams’s parents said they kept him close: an early curfew and no hanging out late at house parties. They knew what trouble could come to a 16-year-old boy at certain times in certain corners of the city. Days earlier a young gunman had fired into a group of teenagers in the lobby of a housing project in Brownsville, Brooklyn, wounding five, as a party thumped upstairs.

But it was Saturday night and Iquan wanted to go to the birthday party of a 14-year-old girl in Brownsville. So after a bit of teenage cajoling that left out any mention of a party, his parents relented, allowing him to go with his friends if he promised to return by 10 p.m.

He was heading home when a gunman opened fire just before 10:30. Seven shots. At least one bullet struck Iquan in the head, killing him.

“He texted me: ‘I’m coming home. I’ll be O.K. I love you,’ ” his mother, Tianna Greene, said on Sunday, holding back tears as she spoke outside the family’s 16th-floor apartment in a Bushwick housing project, nearly three miles from the Brownsville block where her son died.

“His best friend died the same way,” Ms. Greene, 33, said without elaborating. “We don’t do parties.”

The killing was the sixth in New York City recorded in the first four days of 2014, and the first in Brownsville, an area of eastern Brooklyn plagued by shootings between rival groups of teenagers, more often jockeying not over drugs or money but for respect and reputation. Easing such tensions and avoiding the attendant bloodshed became a priority for the Police Department under Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. The new commissioner, William J. Bratton, said last week that it would remain so.

But Iquan’s death did not immediately appear to be related to any rivalry familiar to the police or community leaders. Tony Herbert, a community advocate who closely follows the violence in Brownsville and the surrounding areas, said the young men responsible may have come from outside the neighborhood.

The earlier shooting, outside a party in Brownsville on Dec. 31, left five male teenagers with gunshot wounds to their legs and feet, the police said. Detectives believe three of the victims in that shooting — two 16-year-olds and an 18-year-old — were associates of a crew, Addicted to Cash, that has been the target of multiple police investigations and an extensive gang takedown. “That was a gang rivalry,” Mr. Herbert said. No arrests have been made, the police said.

“Saturday was more about bravado,” he said, adding that tips provided by those in the neighborhood pointed to “a different group that I believe is connected with Albany Houses” in Crown Heights.

Iquan’s family members said they did not believe he was the target. The police said there were no others shot outside the party, and that so far they had not located witnesses who had been outside with him at the time.

His father, Keith Williams, 37, said he learned about the gathering from Iquan’s 13-year-old brother, Zaire, who had seen threatening messages posted on Facebook suggesting that “the party was going to get shot up.” Zaire became concerned and told his parents.

Soon after, Ms. Greene called Iquan, who assured her by text that he was fine and insisted that he was not going to the party. “Be safe,” she recalled texting back, before delivering her regular cautionary message. “Eyes and ears.”

Iquan, a sophomore at Frederick Douglass Academy in Brooklyn, had never been arrested, and was not known to be a member of a gang, the police said.

When he had not come home by 10 p.m. on Saturday, his father began calling him repeatedly. “It went to voice mail,” Mr. Williams said, before reflecting on the timing: “As I’m calling, it’s happening.”

Then their apartment’s landline rang. It was one of Iquan’s friends at the scene of the shooting, outside a three-story house at 1856 Prospect Place. “Iquan just got shot,” the friend said. Mr. Williams said for several moments he could not understand the words.

Mr. Herbert, the community activist, said that he knew the family and that Ms. Greene had been a PTA president at a local school. “She was always somebody I could call upon when things happen in the community,” he said.

Standing together in their echoing high-rise hallway, Ms. Greene and Mr. Williams spoke of their son’s passion for music — he aspired to be a rapper — and his interest in math at school. He went by the nickname Rich.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: 16-Year-Old Is Fatally Shot on His Way Home From a Party in Brownsville. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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